well the only credit I can take on this is being smart enough to answer Christian's E-mail when he wrote "Art Chantry sent me"
This was Christian's concept and he did it real nice. I did make him design an actual "traditional" poster using the elements of the spine. I can post a pic later. Those went up around town too.
But to the rule of actually getting these out into public they were distributed in plain sight. They were able to deliver a message even though it may have gone to a select few.
This band is sort of in a niche market of (pseudo) intellectual hipsters so the folks that knew the band would respond to this immediately. those that didn't, if they opened the book, got a nice little bio we printed on the inner sleeve. The show was sold out I think well before we even printed them and we knew they would. That allowed us to take a risk with the design.
One of the reasons Christian and Paul are my partners is they both think way outside of normal convention. I know alot of the stuff I did with Factor 27 started us down that road but these guys keep us moving further.
VU fans should recognize all three of the elements on this. the type at the bottom may be hard to see in this jpeg though. The Black Angels are from Austin and have a heavy VU/Brian Jonestown Massacre sound.
Reader's Digest used to issue (they may still do it) collections of short stories. They looked exactly like this. The pattern and spine is straight off the books we bought to do this project. they were from the 70's and had really ugly colour combos and patterns.
This whole project was focused directly at Decemberists fans who got it. Both the concept of the band being very literary and remembering the old Digest books.
It was a poster for nerds. We also printed big versions of just the spine that were much larger.